ITIH4 and esophageal squamous cell carcinoma: Sun et al. (2021b) identified inter-alpha-trypsin inhibitor heavy chain 4 as another novel marker for early gastric cancers accompanied by the diagnostic AUC of 0.839 with high sensitivity of 73.08% and high specificity of 94.44%. In our previous study, we found that IGFBP7 might act as a novel serological marker for early detection of esophageal squamous cell carcinoma and esophagogastric junction adenocarcinoma, with the AUC of 0.725 (95% CI [0.633–0.817]) and 0.749 (95% CI [0.644–0.854]), respectively (Huang et al., 2019; Liu et al., 2020).